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Bee-ware: the flying cane toad is on the way

Graeme O'Neill

BEEKEEPERS and honey producers are warning that an invasion of feral Asian honey bees could destroy their industry and will march to Parliament House in Canberra this week, protesting the abandoning of a program to eradicate the bees.

The bees have established a foothold in northern Queensland since 2007.

Mr Weatherhead, who chairs the Australian Honey Bee Industry Council's quarantine committee, is a member of the Asian Honeybee National Management Group, which voted by a narrow margin last month to end the eradication program on March 21.

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Mr Weatherhead said if the Cairns infestation could not be eradicated, the invader could destroy Australia's honey industry, disrupt horticultural pollination services, threaten biodiversity, menace public health, and impose heavy disinfestations costs on Australia's export industries.

The cost of a campaign to eradicate the bees was insignificant, he said, measured against the enormous cost to the community and the environment if they spread across Australia.

The Commonwealth Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry said this month that although the management group had not reached a consensus, its majority view was that it was no longer technically feasible to achieve complete eradication.

Mr Weatherhead said: ''We've only got one chance to eradicate it. We have to keep going while that chance still exists.

''I don't think the people who made this decision really understand the damage this bee will do in Australia.''

Asian bee expert Dr Denis Anderson, of CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences in Canberra, said the Cairns incursion could be traced to Indonesia's program to resettle Javanese peasant farmers in its Irian Jaya province in the 1970s.

The Irian Jaya introduction had seen the feral bees carrying parasitic varroa mites spread through much of Papua New Guinea.

Asian bees could not be kept in hives, but were prolific hive-robbers. In half a decade, an infestation in the Solomon Islands had cut the number of commercial hives from 2000 to just five.

Any similar takeover in Australia would disrupt commercial pollination services for horticulture, including northern Victoria's almond and stone-fruit orchards.